Kṛṣṇa Becomes Real: Conversion and Contagious Faith in Contemporary China

A great lacuna exists at the intersection of Hindu studies and the study of religion in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). This paper contributes to filling this gap by exploring (1) how and why, since the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, various Chinese citizens have come to embrace lives of devotion centered on the Hindu deity Kṛṣṇa, and (2) how, despite the social and political challenges they face as religious actors in China, devotees manage to maintain and even strengthen their faiths. In doing so, it makes use of a wide range of previously neglected English- and Chinese-language sources, including hundreds of hours of archived recordings, and interviews conducted over nine months of ethnographic fieldwork (July 2022–May 2023) with Chinese members of the International Society for Kṛṣṇa Consciousness (ISKCON), a Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava organization.

PRC citizens who have become devotees of Kṛṣṇa vary a great deal in terms of age and socio-economic background. However, despite this diversity, there exist some general trends concerning how and why they join ISKCON. Most journeys are in keeping with the observations of scholars like Rodney Stark and Roger Finke (2000). For instance, many devotees come to Kṛṣṇa via a colleague, a friend, a family member, or lover—someone with whom they are close. Others quickly develop strong relations with the devotees whom they first meet. In most cases, becoming an ISKCON member also involves previous religious participation, especially in Pure Land Buddhism. That most Chinese devotees would come from this tradition is hardly surprising since it shares a striking number of similarities with Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism. In moving to the latter from Pure Land Buddhism, one transfers an extraordinary amount of “religious capital” (Stark and Finke 2000, p. 120). Thus, her or his conversion a less daunting than it would be if coming from most other traditions.

When an individual becomes a Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavite, she or he evidently feels that the benefits outweigh those offered by alternative options. Nevertheless, in China, establishing oneself in a foreign religion is rarely a smooth process. I briefly discuss some of the political and social challenges that Chinese devotees face as they adopt a new way of living in and seeing the world. I then consider how, despite these difficulties, practitioners preserve and strengthen their faiths.

Sustaining faith in benevolent deities and experiencing them as real is hard. It takes work. This is the premise of anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann’s (2020) monograph How God Becomes Real. She observes that religious individuals are continually besieged by distractions and apparent contradictions which work to thwart their attempts to be faithful. Approaching the issue agnostically, Luhrmann argues that maintaining faith in gods and spirits (whom, since undetectable to our bodily senses, she refers to as “invisible others”) requires imagination and deliberate participation in rituals designed to transform our ways of thinking. Faith in benevolent deities is not the default condition of human beings. Rather, it demands taking up practices and embracing stories that together reorient our focus beyond the reality of the everyday to the less-available world of faith and keep us situated there where divinities exist and matter.

More is needed, though, than frequent reminders to shift perception. To have faith, Luhrmann argues, deities must also feel real. They come to be experienced in this way through “microprocesses of attending,” what she calls “acts of real-making” or “kindling” (p. xi). These acts and experiences provide subjective evidence for the reality of invisible others. They allow gods and spirits to be known not just cognitively but viscerally. Eventually, through all of this “real-making,” people begin to see gods and spirits as responsive, alive, and taking an interest in their lives. As Luhrman so eloquently puts it, “the altar becomes more than gilded wood” and “the icon’s eyes look back at them, ablaze” (p. xi).

I explore the various practices which make Kṛṣṇa feel more real for devotees in China. I draw heavily on Luhrman’s work but also expand on it by looking specifically at the role that association among practitioners plays in this process. The subject of association interests me in part because it receives only cursory attention in Luhrman’s monograph. However, I am first and foremost drawn to contemplate its power because my interlocutors themselves emphasize its significance for fostering faith. Drawing on Durkheim (1912) and his intellectual descendants, I explore first the ability for large-scale gatherings to provide powerful and complex moments of collective emotion and thereby evidence for some devotees of Kṛṣṇa’s existence. Then, I consider more intimate association, including one-on-one encounters.

Many of my interlocutors are of the opinion that faith in Kṛṣṇa is contagious. In attempting to make sense of this claim, I find inspiration in the works of psychologists Elaine Hatfield, John Cacioppo, and Richard Rapson (1994) as well as neurologist Robert Burton (2008). The former have confirmed the contagious nature of emotions and have established the mechanisms by which they spread. They suggest that one individual may adopt the emotions of another as she or he unconsciously “mimic[s] or synchronize[s] with the” (p. 5) physical and vocal expressions of that person. They have found that adopting emotional representations actually causes us to feel the corresponding emotions and “converge emotionally” (p. 5) with those around us. Burton, for his part, convincingly argues that epistemic feelings, that is, “feelings of knowing, correctness, conviction, and certainty” (p. 218), are akin to basic emotions like love, anger, and fear.

Since epistemic feelings are like primary emotions, I argue that they might also be transmitted to others in a similar manner. We can easily identify with sight and sound people who appear confident or certain about something. Just as they do fear or anger, people express certainty with their bodies and voices. Since the emotional representations of such individuals are readily available for imitation, it is highly probable that, by interacting with them, devotees can become more certain of Kṛṣṇa’s existence through affective synchronization. Indeed, I conclude that my interlocutors are correct. Faith in Kṛṣṇa is, in fact, contagious.